Poverty, Health, and Nutrition

“Indices can be powerful tools for international monitoring and advocacy, and if used in international rankings, can help foster a sense of healthy competition among countries. With this in mind, IFPRI’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) was ...

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that worldwide progress in reducing hunger remains slow. The 2009 global GHI has fallen by only one quarter from the 1990 GHI. Southeast Asia, the Near East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean ...

This paper is concerned with the issue of the most cost-effective way of improving access to education for poor households in developing countries. We consider two alternatives: (1) extensive expansion of the school system (i.e., bringing ...

A food demand system is proposed, based on demand for energy, variety, and tastes of foods. By specifying utility as an explicit function of these characteristics, the entire matrix of demand elasticities can be derived for n foods and one ...

This document summarizes findings from the Accra Urban Food and Nutrition Study (AUFNS) about the importance of care as an input to child nutrition and the relative contribution of various maternal and household resources to the provision ...

This paper presents a profile of poverty in Egypt for 1997. It assesses the magnitude of poverty and its distribution across geographic and socioeconomic groups, provides information on the characteristics of the poor, illustrates the ...

The facts: Child malnutrition in India: India is home to 40 percent of the world’s malnourished children and 35 percent of the developing world’s low-birth-weight infants; every year 2.5 million children die in India, accounting for ...

CONTENTS: Brief 1. Overview / James L. Garrett — Brief 2. An urbanizing world / Martin Brockerhoff — Brief 3. Rural-urban interdependence / Ceclia Tacoli — Brief 4. Urban livelihoods and labor markets / Arjan de Haan — ...

Agnes Quisumbing, a research fellow, co-leads a research program analyzing the factors that enable individuals, households, and communities to move out of poverty over the long term. Her past work at IFPRI focused on how resource allocation ...

Breeding for food-staple plant varieties that load high amounts of iron and zinc in their seeds holds great promise for making a significant, low-cost, and sustainable contribution to reducing iron and zinc deficiencies in humans in developing ...

Executive Summary Relationship Between Agriculture and the Millennium Development Goals In 2000 the member states of the United Nations adopted the Millennium Declaration as a renewed commitment to human development. The Declaration includes ...

Agriculture is the main source of livelihood of the majority of people affected by HIV and AIDS globally, and it is being progressively undermined by the disease. In Sub-Saharan Africa AIDS is affecting the rural landscape in ways that demand a ...

In a report written by international experts in agricultural economics, health, anthropology, and nutrition…the authors examine the impacts of HIV and AIDS on labor markets and wages, household income and consumption dynamics, and on the ...

More about Amber Peterman in Google Scholar Amber joined IFPRI in July 2009 and works primarily on cross-cutting gender and development related research including the strengthening women’s assets program. She has particular interest in ...

Using both national-sample and program-level census survey data, we evaluate the distributional power of Mexico’s Programa Nacional de Educacion, Salud y Alimentacion (PROGRESA) transfers using the so-called distributional ...

One of the major components of the PROGRESA program has been directed toward improving the nutritional status of small children in poor rural communities in Mexico. Results suggest that PROGRESA may be having fairly substantial effects on ...

Development institutions and projects frequently seek to target poorer segments of the population. Yet, existing methods for evaluating their outreach are generally unsuited to most operational settings, since they are either too costly and ...

This report focuses on the evaluation of the operational performance of PROGRESA. Essentially well conceived and designed programs, in the sense of having a good understanding of the outputs, can fail due to poor implementation resulting in poor ...

Andrew joined IFPRI in July 2007 as a Research Analyst. Before coming to IFPRI, he conducted his dissertation field research in Mali where he extended a panel data set from 1997 and conducted a larger cross-sectional survey of 2,100 households ...

This paper aims to empirically identify migrants’ assimilation process by examining their wage dynamics in one urban labor market of a developing country: Bangkok, Thailand. Although prior studies on migration highlight the effects of ...

A methodology to produce disaggregated estimates of inequality is implemented in three developing countries: Ecuador, Madagascar, and Mozambique. These inequality estimates are decomposed into progressively more disaggregated spatial units and ...

Many prior studies find significant cross-sectional positive ordinary least squares (OLS) associations between maternal human capital (usually maternal schooling attainment) and children’s human capital (usually children’s schooling, ...

The authors evaluate the size of the welfare losses from using alternative “imperfect” welfare indicators as substitutes for the conventionally preferred consumption indicator. They find that whereas the undercoverage and leakage ...

“This study attempts to analyze changing patterns of land transfers and schooling investments by gender over three generations in customary land areas of Ghana’s Western Region. Although traditional matrilineal inheritance rules deny ...

This paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in ten developing countries. It compares poverty measures for males and females and male- and female-headed households, and investigates the sensitivity of these measures to ...

In more than a dozen African countries the rate of undernourishment is more than 40 percent, exceeding 50 percent in those countries experiencing or emerging from armed conflict. As a result, more than a third of African children suffer stunted ...

The objective of this report is to summarize progress towards measurement of selected childcare and feeding practices, and to discuss the feasibility and usefulness of these measurements in research and program contexts. This is the third in a ...

As the goals of international agricultural research move beyond increasing food production to the broader aims of reducing poverty, both agricultural research and studies of its impact become more complex. Yet examining the magnitude and ...

As the goals of international agricultural research move beyond increasing food production to the broader aims of reducing poverty, both agricultural research and studies of its impact become more complex. Yet examining the magnitude and ...

“This study is part of a larger effort to explore the impact of agricultural research on poverty reduction. It examines the diffusion and impact of hybrid maize in selected resettlement areas of rural Zimbabwe, paying particular attention ...

“…IFPRI examined the effectiveness of community-based targeting following three recent emergencies: the 1998 floods in Bangladesh; the 2002 drought in Ethiopia; and the 2001-02 failed maize harvest in Malawi. All three cases show ...

This paper reviews current knowledge and experience with food-based approaches to reduce vitamin A and iron deficiencies. It presents a review of recently published literature, highlights some of the lessons learned, and identifies knowledge gaps ...

“This paper contributes to the economic analysis of marriage and the family by examining and analyzing the relative importance of potential determinants of assets brought to marriages in rural Ethiopia. One potential determinant is ...

The interactions between HIV/AIDS and food and nutrition insecurity are becoming clearer as research fills knowledge gaps. To address these gaps, different actors (from individual household members to national policymakers) need tools and ...

One important impediment to improved policies and investments for poor and rural people in Africa has been a lack of data on actual conditions. To begin to help fill this data gap, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) worked ...

Longitudinal household data can have considerable advantages over much more widely used cross-sectional data. The collection of longitudinal data, however, may be difficult and expensive. One problem that has concerned many analysts is that ...

This paper examines attrition in the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (1993-1998) and assesses the extent of attrition bias for a specific empirical example. The analysis shows that 1993 first round nonresponse is largely unrelated to ...

This paper uses a panel data of 347 households in Egypt to measure changes in household consumption between 1997 and 1999 and to identify causes behind the changes. Per capita consumption decreased for the households during this time and, while ...

IFPRI is collaborating with CARE-Bangladesh to provide research and support for its SHAHAR project for improving urban livelihoods. This Country Report addresses the research focus, under Project Leader, James Garrett, and the key findings and ...

Policies built on presumptions of separateness or on traditional notions of urban and rural livelihoods diminish the possibilities for economic growth and poverty reduction. More effective policies will take the diversity of livelihoods along the ...

Cash transfer programs are rare in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper describes the evolution of a cash transfer program in major urban centers of Mozambique, from its inception in 1990 through two major reorganizations until October 1998. ...

Micronutrient malnutrition is still a problem of unacceptable proportions in developing countries. Iron and vitamin A deficiencies are the most widespread nutrition deficiencies in the world today, affecting perhaps as many as 3.5 billion ...

“This brief examines the economy-wide impact of implementing and financing a universal or basic income grant (BIG) in South Africa. The various financing scenarios suggested by the proponents of the grant are presented, and these are ...

Fortified donated cereal blends can greatly contribute to improving the nutritional quality of complementary foods, but are not sufficient to completely close the iron and zinc gaps at current fortification levels in Haiti, even when combined ...

Care is the provision in the household and the community of time, attention and support to meet the physical, mental, and social needs of the growing child and other household members. The significance of care has been best articulated in the ...

Cash transfer programs induce multiplier effects when recipients put the money they receive to work to generate additional income. The ultimate income effects are multiples of the amounts transferred. This paper analyzes the PROCAMPO program in ...

This study explores the impact of changes in environmental conditions on intrahousehold labor allocation to the collection of environmental goods such as fuelwood and leaf fodder for a sample of rural Nepali households. Using household-level ...

Many of the challenges facing children now are a function of the changing times, including increases in urbanization, political violence, changing family forms, and, in some a cases, decreased supplies of adequate food. This paper reviews the ...

Child labor is widespread in developing countries, but its causes are debatable. Poverty is considered the primary reason, but many theoretical and empirical analyses show that other factors, such as lack of access to credit, poor school quality, ...

“Among the many devastating consequences of the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, the rapidly growing orphan population demands particular attention. Today, over 12 million children in the region have been orphaned by AIDS, a population ...

This study investigates the effects of childcare on work and earnings of mothers in poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City. Recognizing that mothe’rs work status may depend on the availability of childcare, decisions to participate in the ...

Chapter 15 of The dragon and the elephant: Agricultural and rural reforms in China and India, ed. Ashok Gulati, and Shenggen Fan. Pp. 327-342.

Household food security (HFS) represents the guiding principle underlying many rural development projects. It plays an important role in the targeting of projects, the selection of appropriate interventions, and the monitoring and evaluation of ...

“CARE began PROSPECT (Program of Support for Poverty Elimination and Community Transformation) in 1998. PROSPECT aims to reduce poverty in peri-urban areas of Lusaka. It employs a community-based approach to carry out three types of ...

“To examine how local income distribution affects both a community’s ability to pay for schooling and the quality of that schooling, this research merges household and school census data from South Africa. Empirical results are ...

“This case study examines the scaling-up experiences of two microfinance institutions: the Nirdhan Utthan Bank Limited (NUBL) in Nepal and the Self-Help Group (SHG)-Bank linkage program of the National Agricultural Bank for Agriculture and ...

Bangladesh has some social safety net programs that transfer food to the poor, some that transfer cash, and some that provide a combination of both. This study evaluates the relative impacts of food and cash transfers on food security and ...

This paper investigates whether inferences drawn about a population are sensitive to the manner by which those data are obtained. It compares information obtained using participatory appraisal techniques with a survey of households randomly drawn ...

This paper introduces some relatively straightforward computational tools for estimating poverty measures from the sort of data that are typically available from published sources. All that is required for using these tools is an elementary ...

In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work. PROGRESA is a new ...

“For more than two centuries, proponents and critics of an open global economy have debated whether the free flows of goods, services, and capital make the world more peaceful and food secure or instead exacerbate inequalities and ...

Governments, policymakers, and donors attach a great deal of importance to poverty outreach-the extent to which MFIs serve poor and disadvantaged locations-when evaluating microfinance institutions (MFIs). With the above considerations in mind, ...

This paper synthesizes the results of five studies using household panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Mali, Mexico and Russia, which examine the extent to which households are able through formal and/or informal arrangements to insure their ...

“This paper explores risk sharing in the Zone Lacustre, Mali, as viewed through the lens of consumption smoothing. We find that idiosyncratic shocks appear to have little impact on consumption, and that households respond to these shocks in ...

This paper investigates how the control and devolution of productive assets are allocated among husband and wife. Using detailed household data from rural Ethiopia, the authors show that assets brought to marriage, ownership of assets, control ...

The international and local Nicaraguan media have widely reported on the “coffee crisis” in Latin America and there is substantial evidence that there has been a downturn and that this has been more severe in the coffee-growing ...

The Nicaraguan Red de Proteccion Social (RPS) suggests that successful safety nets can protect the most affected by crisis without abandoning conditionality.

Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for five Latin American countries (seven data sets) were used to explore the feasibility of creating a composite feeding index and to examine the association between feeding practices and child ...

“Over the past decade, donor-funded policies and programs designed to address undernutrition in the Global South have shifted away from agriculture-based strategies toward nutrient supplementation and food fortification programs. Given the ...

The database compiled by IFPRI (see policy brief on microfinance institutions [MFIs] in Africa, Asia, and Latin America) counts almost 1,500 microfinance institutions (688 in Indonesia and 790 in other countries) supported by international ...

Over the period mid-October, 1997, through early February, 1998, CARE Tanzania implemented an Urban Livelihood Security Assessment (ULSA) in Dar es Salaam. The goal of the ULSA was to identify needs for urban programming in Dar es Salaam. In ...

Secondary crops are of increasing interest to policymakers and planners in developing countries because of a desire to diversify economic activities and because of their proven potential to raise farm incomes and rural employment. To assess this ...

Unlike the more technical issues covered in other guides, this topic is one that is unlikely to be familiar to many development project staff. For this reason, throughout this guide, reference is made to the Rural Development Plan of the Western ...

Previous research on the determinants of credit rationing exclusively focused on the behavior of formal lenders who contract directly with an individual borrower. Based on a household survey in Madagascar, this paper presents an analysis of ...

Poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society. They also provide us with important clues to the underlying determinants of poverty. However, important as ...

This report presents an analysis of the structural determinants of living standards and poverty in Mozambique, which is based on nationally-representative data from the first national household living standards survey since the end of the civil ...

This report attempts to develop a consistent approach to determining the procurement price of rice and improving the operational effectiveness of the procurement program in order to support farm-level prices of rice at harvest seasons. The report ...

Household food security is an important measure of well-being. Although it may not encapsulate all dimensions of poverty, the inability of households to obtain access to enough food for an active, healthy life is surely an important component of ...

How many microfinance institutions (MFIs) exist in the developing world? What are their current performances? In 1999, an International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) team on microfinance conducted a survey on MFIs in Asia, Africa, and ...

The concern that learning performance may be adversely affected by increased class size appears to be unfounded. But unchecked, the negative peer effect could hinder student achievement.

The question raised in the title is an important one to the microfinance sector, especially since the Microcredit Summit held in Washington, DC, in 1997. In order to gain more transparency on the depth of poverty outreach, the Consultative Group ...

Using data from fieldwork conducted in Nepal, the impact of a project designed to commercialize vegetables and fruits - the Vegetable and Fruit Cash Crop Program (VFC)- on male and female time allocation is examined. Using a rigorous time ...

High urbanization rates in Latin America are accompanied by an increase in women’s participation in the labor force and the number of households headed by single mothers. Reliable and affordable childcare alternatives are thus becoming ...

Previous research has suggested that urban agriculture has a positive impact on the household food security and nutritional status of low-socioeconomic status groups in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, but a formal test of the link between ...

Early childhood nutrition is thought to be an important input into subsequent academic achievement. This paper investigates the nutrition-learning nexus using a unique longitudinal data set, which follows a large sample of Philippine children ...

“While nutritional intake in early childhood provides the basis for a child’s health capital, investments in schooling provide the basis for a child’s knowledge capital. That store of knowledge, in turn, will eventually be ...

The impact of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) on people’s lives and on development is staggering. Millions have died and livelihoods have been devastated, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. ...

This paper examines the allocation of productive resources within rural households of poor countries. Building upon the existing literature, it provides a consistent framework from which to study productive efficiency and intrahousehold equity. ...

This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed ...

This paper evaluates the effect (in terms of private returns) of investment in education on wages in the rural Philippines. Statistical endogeneity of education in the wage function may result from (1) unobserved determinants of education that ...

“The “Cost of Basic Needs” (CBN) approach to drawing consumption-based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence ...

IFPRI assessed CARE-Ethiopia’s Urban Food-for-Work Project in order to draw lessons about how to work effectively in urban areas. This country study gives information on the research focus, under Project Leader, James Garrett, highlights of ...

One of the major components of the PROGRESA program has been directed toward improving the nutritional status of small children in poor rural communities in Mexico. Results suggest that PROGRESA may be having fairly substantial effects on ...

One of the common criticisms of poverty alleviation programs is that the high share of administrative (nontransfer) costs substantially reduces the programs’ impact on poverty. But very little empirical evidence exists on program costs. ...

The authors set out a general equilibrium model for the evaluation of a domestically financed transfer program, which helps to combine the results from a computable general equilibrium model with disaggregated household data.Using a Mexican cash ...

“In Ethiopia, while superficial examination suggests strong disincentive effects of food aid on labor supply and agricultural activities, these largely vanish under more careful statistical analysis.” — from Text

“One in three pre-school children in the developing world is undernourished. As a consequence, their human rights are violated. In addition, they are more likely to have impaired immune systems, poorer cognitive development, lower ...

The prevalent and generally accepted image of famine in Ethiopia has been one of hopeless inevitability with food shortage and starvation being an unavoidable consequence of environmental hardship combined with economic and political ...

Urban expansion and issues of food supply and distribution to and in the cities have four major consequences for urban food security. The first is the competition between demands for land needed for housing, industry, and infrastructure and land ...

The synergy between food assistance and market development contributed to avoiding a food-price crisis. In addition to being well targeted, timely, and efficiently administered, food assistance needs to reach the vulnerable in sufficient amounts ...

“Food aid programs have become increasingly important for disaster relief in many developing countries. In Ethiopia, a drought-stricken economy with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world, food aid has amounted to almost 10 ...

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted a comprehensive study of the efficiency of food distribution in food aid-supported programs in Bangladesh. The capacity and efficiency of the food distribution system was assessed ...

“This report introduces new estimates of food insecurity based on food acquisition data collected directly from households as part of national household expenditure surveys (HESs) conducted in 12 Sub-Saharan African countries.The report has ...

The success of development policy depends on the ability to successfully anticipate the response of individuals to changing incentives. Often, however, actual responses differ from anticipated responses. One important reason for this divergence ...

This paper summarizes findings from a formative research study conducted in Haiti to develop a behavior change communication (BCC) strategy to improve infant and child feeding practices and to reduce childhood malnutrition. It describes the ...

Futoshi Yamauchi joined IFPRI in 2002, after working as a lecturer at the Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University and as an associate professor at the International Graduate School of Social Sciences, Yokohama National University. In ...

This paper presents new evidence on the association between gender and poverty based on an empirical analysis of 11 data sets from 10 developing countries. The paper computes income- and expenditure-based poverty measures and investigates their ...

This paper reviews the econometric evidence on gender differences in agricultural productivity. It provides a methodological overview and a critique of (1) production function-based estimates of technical and labor productivity differences by ...

This paper examines the impact of prime-age adult mortality on the transition from school to the labor market of adolescents and on decisions by female adults to participate in the labor force in South Africa. The analysis focuses on that ...

This paper analyzes the ways in which gender issues affect property rights and the use of natural resources in developing countries. It examines the informal practices of resource use, usually involving multiple uses by multiple users. ...

In the Accra Urban Food and Nutrition Study, IFPRI collaborated with the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research and the World Health Organization to examine the nature of urban poverty and how it relates to food insecurity and ...

This study uses data from a representative survey of households with preschoolers in Accra, Ghana to (1) examine the importance of care practices for children’s height-for-age z-scores (HAZ); and (2) identify subgroups of children for whom ...

Publicly funded, noncontributory transfer programs targeted to the poor and vulnerable have a long history. Free food distribution was a feature of Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs and of Rome during its Imperial age. England had a succession of ...

IFPRI evaluated the Government of Guatemala’s Community Day Care Centers Program to determine its effects on children’s nutrition and on their mothers’ wages and employment opportunities. This study provides data on the ...

“Using 1996-97 and 2002-03 nationally representative household surveys, we examine the extent to which growth in Mozambique has been pro-poor. While all sections of society enjoyed a rapid annual increase in consumption between the sample ...

The health and nutritional status of women is important for both the quality of their lives and the survival and healthy development of their children. Adequate nutrition is a human right for all, and the two-way link between nutritional ...

Despite rapid economic growth in recent years, Mozambique remains a very poor country. Expenditure-based poverty measures are reflected in widespread food insecurity and poor health status. In recognition of these problems, the Government of ...

The current food price crisis has received widespread attention, but discussions to date have largely overlooked the gender dimensions of the crisis. More than 15 years of rigorous research on gender and intrahousehold resource allocation suggest ...

Der Welthunger-Index 2008 (WHI) zeigt, dass die Welt seit 1990 langsame Fortschritte bei der Verbesserung der Ernährungssicherheit gemacht hat, wobei sich je nach Region und Land erhebliche Unterschiede ergeben. In den fast zwei Jahrzehnten seit ...

The Lake Victoria region has the highest HIV prevalence in the East African Community, which comprises Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. This region also has a significant concentration of commercial agricultural plantations, which ...

“To effectively address the interactions between HIV/AIDS and food insecurity, there’s a need to fill knowledge gaps. strengthen capacity, and learn-by-doing in partnership with people who are directly affected.” — ...

This paper first reviews the potential pathways through which HIV/AIDS affects nutrition, food security, and the livelihoods of households, particularly those dependent on agriculture. With regard to nutrition, HIV/AIDS significantly impacts ...

“There is hardly need these days to repeat that HIV/AIDS is devastating African societies and economies, threatening the hard-won human development gains of the past several decades. The changes to the development landscape wrought by AIDS ...

Food as a human right was first laid down 50 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The last 10 years, in particular, have witnessed an increased recognition of the importance of the human rights approach for designing policies ...

Education and child health are important tools of poverty reduction and economic development. With the recent focus on universal primary education as a Millennium Development Goal, many developing countries have made dramatic improvements in ...

This paper uses project and household data to examine the ability of 100 or so public works projects in Western Cape Province, South Africa, to target benefits-both direct and indirect-to those living below the poverty line. We find that public ...

The reliability of food security rating, a variant of the more familiar wealth ranking procedure, was tested in a rural area of Western Honduras. Twenty workshop sessions were conducted in 13 different communities, with members of organized small ...

Human milk is a food that meets all conditions for an infant’s nutrition security and is the most important food for more than 10 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa (children less than three years of age). Statistics on ...

In 2000, the Nicaraguan government implemented a conditional cash transfer program designed to improve the nutritional, health, and educational status of poor households, and thereby to reduce short- and long-term poverty. Based on the Mexican ...

This paper presents the main findings of a quantitative evaluation of the Red de Protección Social (RPS), a conditional cash transfer program in Nicaragua, against its primary objectives. These included supplementing income to increase household ...

The paper departs from the standard practice that takes the estimated marginal effects of either the amount of credit received or membership in a credit program as measures of the impact of access to credit on household welfare. The marginal ...

The spectacular growth of the microfinance industry has been fueled not by market forces but by conscious actions of national governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and donors who view microfinance as an effective tool for alleviating ...

This paper examines the impacts of prenatal conditions and water quality on child growth using recent data from Indonesia. Our empirical results show that an increase in birth weight has significant positive effects on children’s subsequent ...

While famines and other episodes of severe hunger receive significant press coverage and attract much public attention, chronic hunger and malnutrition are considerably more prevalent in Africa. It is estimated that 14 percent of children are ...

This paper examines the impact of wheat transfers and cash incomes on wheat consumption and wheat markets. Using propensity score- matching techniques, the total marginal propensity to consume (MPC) for wheat is, on average, 0.33, ranging from ...

“The paper examines, taking into account the urban-rural divides, the changes and welfare implications of income diversification in Zimbabwe following macroeconomic policy changes and droughts of the early 1990s. Data from two comparable ...

What can be done to increase the effective participation of women in food and nutrition security in Africa? This brief advocates a two-pronged approach. First, eradicate discrimination against women, and second, promote catch-up by implementing ...

This document summarizes new and updated indicators to assess infant and young child feeding. The analytic work providing the evidence for these indicators was supported through a partnership of the International Food Policy Research Institute ...

This paper examines the equity implications of the evolution of land rights from communal land tenure to individualization in customary land areas in Western Sumatra. This brief sets forth policy implications: Preference for sons in the ...

The synergy between food assistance and market development contributed to avoiding a food-price crisis. In addition to being well targeted, timely, and efficiently administered, food assistance needs to reach the vulnerable in sufficient amounts ...

“Poverty mapping applies models of household welfare developed from detailed household consumption and expenditure surveys to the extensive but less detailed data from national censuses. A poverty map for Malawi, developed by drawing upon ...

The migration of labor across international boundaries has increased rapidly since 1990. Over 190 million individuals now live outside their country of birth, and the majority of migrants leave developing countries for countries with higher ...

The paper reviews recent theory and empirical evidence testing unitary versus collective models of the household. In contrast to the unitary model, the collective model posits that individuals within households have different preferences and do ...

This study explores the intrahousehold impact of transfer of modern agricultural technology from a gender perspective. The data suggest that group-based programs targeting women have a greater potential to address gender relations within the ...

Por mucho tiempo se ha sabido que una buena nutrición es esencial para el desarrollo físico y cognoscitivo de los niños, pero las evidencias recientes arrojan nueva luz sobre el momento óptimo de las intervenciones para mejorar la nutrición ...

Although dietary diversity is universally recognized as a key component of healthy diets, there is still a lack of consensus on how to measure and operationalize it. This paper focuses on the issues of dietary diversity in developing countries. ...

This paper uses data from national household expenditure surveys to explore whether food insecurity is more severe in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. It employs two indicators of the diet quantity dimension of food insecurity, or the inability ...

“Recent research has shown that improving women’s decisionmaking power relative to men’s within households leads to improvements in a variety of well-being outcomes for children. In South Asia, where the influence of ...

This document summarizes 24 months of extensive research by the International Food Policy Research Institute designed to evaluate whether PROGRESA has been successful at achieving its goals. The evaluation analyzes what has been the impact of ...

“The primary goal of emergency food aid after an economic shock is often to bolster short-term food and nutrition security. However, these transfers also act as insurance against other shock effects, such as destruction of assets and ...

Jef Leroy joined IFPRI in July 2009 as a Research Fellow in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division. Before joining IFPRI, he was a research associate at the Center for Evaluation Research and Surveys at the National Institute of Public ...

John Hoddinott is a Deputy Director in the Poverty Health and Nutrition Division. Before joining IFPRI he held university appointments in Canada and the United Kingdom, including a University Lectureship in Economics and Fellowship at Lady ...

Both food for work and free distributiona are reaching poor and vulnerable households ahd have a positive direct impact on weight-for-height. The benefits of the programmes vary depending on the sex of the child, and at times, the sex of ...

The authors use individual observations from a panel of families during the period of the peso crisis in Mexico to investigate whether and how labor market shocks, as proxied by changes in the gender- and age-specific unemployment rates in the ...

The authors address questions such as: (1) how do parents allocate land and education between sons and daughters? (2) how do changing returns to land and human capital affect parents’ investments in children? (3) what do gender differences ...

This paper explores statistically the implications of the shift from communal to individualized tenure on the distribution of land and schooling between sons and daughters in matrilineal societies, based on a Sumatra case study. The inheritance ...

The programme has a substantial positive impact on the diet of children. It also complements the basic livelihood strategies of poor urban women working outside the home.

In Africa and elsewhere, safety nets were promoted in the 1980s as a response to the (presumably short-term) adverse effects of structural adjustment. Though some safety nets had a developmental component, safety nets are still largely associated ...

With high population density and limited land availability, Vietnam’s Red River Delta is undergoing a major transformation as its economic base moves away from subsistence farming towards intensive, high-value food production for export and ...

“”This paper uses longitudinal data from 15 villages in rural Ethiopia to explore the nature and consequences of these links. It addresses the following questions: (1) What are the links between rural households and local urban ...

Data from many countries show that the concentration of poverty and malnutrition is shifting from rural to urban areas. Although many rural people move to the cities seeking to improve their well-being, they often remain mired in poverty and ...

“With urban dwellers purchasing 80 percent or more of their food, understanding urban employment is critical to designing policies and programs to address urban hunger and poverty. Reviewing the literature, but also using data from ...

“This paper examines the impact of preschool malnutrition on subsequent human capital formation in rural Zimbabwe using a maternal fixed effects-instrumental variables (MFE-IV) estimator with a long-term panel data set. Representations of ...

This atlas combines information and analyses of the 1998 Population and Housing Census and the 1997-98 Integrated Household Survey, together with some sectorally specific data, to provide policy makers, students, educators and interested ...

“This study analyzes work, childcare arrangements, and earnings of mothers in the poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City and Greater Accra, Ghana, two urban areas where formal- and informal-sector work differ in importance. Unlike previous ...

In Malawi, maize is the major crop and food staple. Given limited off-farm employment opportunities, much-needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology ...

This paper examines how market institutions can affect links between urban and rural areas with specific emphasis on goods market integration in the national context.Traditionally, development researchers and practitioners have focused either on ...

This paper examines the effect of AIDS-related mortality of the prime age adult population on marriage behavior among women in Malawi. A rise in prime-age adult mortality increases risks associated with the search for a marriage partner in the ...

Malnutrition afflicts nearly 170 million preschool children in developing countries, or every third child under the age of five. It plays a role in more than half of all preschooler child deaths—over 5 million preventable deaths per year. Those ...

This guide outlines methodologies that will assist practitioners to improve the nutrition impact of development activities. The methodologies described here are jointly referred to as nutritional assessment. The guide begins by explaining what is ...

This paper focuses on dynamics within couples, although the authors recognize that dynamics among extended family members and across generations are of substantial interest. Decisions about resource allocations, control over economic resources, ...

Este libro, basado en la experiencia de campo del IFPRI y en la interacción con diversas organizaciones asociadas, está dirigido a ayudar a los practicantes del desarrollo a superar estas restricciones. La audiencia principal es la ...

This collection of policy briefs cover research results from a multicountry research program on rural finance policies for food security of the poor, 1994-2000. It offers lessons learned from IFPRI´s program on rural finance and household food ...

This paper discusses the potential long-term effects of micronutrient malnutrition in early childhood on obesity and related disease outcomes. The links between early micronutrient malnutrition, stunting, and subsequent short adult stature - ...

This paper explores the diversity of the experience of migrants to rural, peri-urban, and urban areas using a unique longitudinal data set from the Philippines. In 2003 and 2004, the Bukidnon Panel Study followed up with 448 families in rural ...

A tremendous increase in the number of orphans associated with a sharp rise in prime-age adult mortality due to AIDS has become a serious problem in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, more than 30 percent of school-aged children have lost at least one ...

The approach of this study is to examine the effects of household asset ownership patterns on the morbidity status of male and female preschoolers, measured as the number of illness days in the two weeks preceding the household survey.Section 2 ...

“For a number of reasons, progress in improving child feeding practices in the developing world has been remarkably slow. First, complementary feeding practices encompass a number of interrelated behaviors that need to be addressed ...

Mycotoxins come under regulatory limits in foods and feeds because they are carcinogens. Nevertheless, in addition to tumorigenic properties, many mycotoxins are anti-nutritional factors causing unthrifty growth and development of young animals. ...

New and noteworthy items on child survival, growth and development, HIV/AIDS, micronutrients, obesity, nutrition in crises adn shocks, and nutrition policy are the main features of this issue of NNN.

CHILD SURVIVAL, GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT

CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT

“Given the number of undernourished people in the developing world and the increasingly complex risks to food security, policymakers are faced with an enormous agenda. Freeing people from hunger will require more and better-targeted ...

Upon arrival in a new location, migrants collect information from a variety of sources: their own resources, job postings, and informal networks of friends and neighbors, including those who have moved to the destination from the same place of ...

Since the late 1970s dramatic economic changes have taken place in the agricultural sector in the highlands of Guatemala. The introduction of new export crops, such as snow peas, broccoli, and miniature vegetables, has led to yet another ...

Both food for work and free distribution are reaching poor and vulnerable households ahd have a positive direct impact on weight-for-height. The benefits of the programmes vary depending on the sex of the child, and at times, the sex of ...

“This paper explores the possibility of applying.. methods… known as small-area estimation to the study of children’s nutritional status as measured by anthropometry. This research in Tanzania is the first attempt to map ...

The paper shows how the so-called distributional characteristic of a policy instrument can be additively decomposed into two components; one that captures the targeting efficiency of the instrument, the other its redistributive efficiency. Using ...

In Bangladesh, the majority of the people suffer from a lack of food security. As a short-run solution to the problem, a targeted intervention of transferring income can be an efficient way of increasing real incomes of the poor. Distributing ...

Given the large amount of funds allocated to food-assisted Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition (MCHN) programmes. it is critical to improve their effectiveness. Operations research holds promise for helping achieve this goal. Effective ...

“The trend is inescapable: more and more people in the developing world are living in the cities. By 2020, the number of people living in developing countries will grow from 4.9 billion to 6.8 billion. Ninety percent of this increase will ...

This paper examines the relationship between community participation and the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce poverty. We develop some simple analytics that are used to structure a review of the extant literature and motivate the ...

This paper is based on community-level data from 188 villages in rural Madagascar. The survey that was conducted in 1997 made extensive use of long-term recall questions ascertaining changes during the past 10 years in rice yields, wages, ...

IFPRI analyzed Peru’s comedores populares (community kitchens) and associated programs to identify lessons for future urban projects. Under Project Leader, James Garrett, IFPRI’s study reviewed the operational experiences of PRODIA ...

Bangladesh has witnessed major strides in providing financial services to the rural poor. These services are provided largely through innovative group-based credit programs of several nongovernmental organizations. The implicit but widespread ...

Because trace minerals are important not only for human nutrition, but for plant nutrition as well, plant breeding holds great promise for making a significant low-cost and sustainable contribution to reducing micronutrient deficiencies in ...

“Policy Analysis for Sustainable Land Management and Food Security in Ethiopia presents a bioeconomic model of this less- favored area in the Ethiopian highlands. The main reason for selecting this case study area is the unique availability ...

“The objective of measuring poverty is usually to make comparisons over time or between two or more groups. Common statistical inference methods are used to determine whether an apparent difference in measured poverty is statistically ...

“This paper presents the poverty analysis of the 1997 98 Malawi Integrated Household Survey. The analysis developed basic needs poverty lines, using consumption-based measures of welfare to classify households and individuals as poor and ...

“Typical living standards surveys can provide a wealth of information about welfare levels, poverty, and other household and individual characteristics. However, these estimates are necessarily at a high level of aggregation, because such ...

This report provides an evaluation of the community-level effects of the Programa Nacional de Educacion, Salud, y Alimentacion (PROGRESA) using household-level data from various rounds of PROGRESA’s evaluation sample (the Encuesta de ...

“…Through a study of seven public works programs implemented in Western Cape province, this report examines the benefits and challenges of pursuing community participation, together with the effects of participation on meeting the ...

An ongoing IFPRI project is assessing the long-term impact of investing in preschool nutrition and the long-term costs of failing to do so. The project includes work in many countries, including the two studies—one in Guatemala and one in ...

This policy brief reviews evidence and draws lessons regarding the role of microfinance for income and consumption smoothing by the poor, and highlights potential areas for product innovation by the microfinance sector to address the demand for ...

Using data that enables us to distinguish between the different components of program participation (i.e., knowledge, application, and acceptance), we investigate the determinants of household behavior and program implementation in a social ...

In early 1998, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) was asked to assist the PROGRESA administration to “determine if PROGRESA is functioning in practice as it is intended to by design.” PROGRESA is one of the ...

Feeding practices are an important determinant of the nutritional status of infants and children. It is therefore useful to measure and describe infant and child feeding practices in a number of contexts. Such measurements could enable (1) ...

Gender norms are an important constraint to increasing agricultural productivity. Inequality in the distribution of resources between men and women is linked with production inefficiency, yet interventions targeting smallholder farmers often fail ...

“Flooding is a normal part of the ecology of Bangladesh. The 1998 flood was especially serious because of its depth and duration. At its peak, the flood covered two-thirds of the country, causing severe damage to the rice crop and ...

The role of school quality in determining educational outcomes has received much research attention in the United States. However, in developing countries, where a significant part of the school age population never attends school, policymakers ...

This paper is intended to present a critique of various aspects of protein related nutritional improvements in maize. Earlier efforts and difficulties in developing germplasm products that failed to meet expectations and lacked agronomic ...

“This paper examines dynamic changes in educational quality and equity differences in the public school system between Black and other racial groups in post-apartheid South Africa, using the ratio of learners to educators in each school, ...

The diversity of urban areas presents substantial challenges to the validity of information from rapid assessments, yet CARE’s experiences in Bangladesh and Tanzania suggest a number of ways that rapid assessment procedures can be ...

“Rather than looking at the association between poverty and various household and individual characteristics on a one-to-one basis (bivariate analysis), which often oversimplifies complex relationships and can lead to erroneous conclusions, ...